Misinformation campaigns designed to confuse investors are causing chaos.

THE BASICS

With the Bitcoin revolution in full force, the cryptocurrency market is also booming. Actually, ‘booming’ might be an understatement—exploding like a supernova is more like it. The crypto-economy is comprised of more than a thousand different digital currencies, many of which are essentially offered as a way to buy what amounts to shares in a company that uses blockchain technology. Every day dozens of coins see price gains at rates that are extremely rare in the traditional stock market. Each month there are at least two or three that really surge in value and capture the attention of the online crypto-community at large. When these surges happen, word spreads quickly across the global infosphere, through social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook, creating a tidal wave of people rushing in to buy out of fear of missing out—or ‘FOMO’ in crypto-slang. Consequently, many of those investors become evangelists for their chosen coin, since one’s financial success then becomes dependent on that coin’s continued growth.

With such a system, news of major company developments, partnerships, or events—or simply rumors of such news—can create self-amplifying crypto-crazes that swing coin prices in ways that make both blockchain companies and investors a lot of money. When the news is big enough to capture the attention of mainstream media reporters, freshly published articles become shilling tools for online investors who are eager to spread the word, and in their minds, the wealth. These people, or at least most of them, aren’t trying to be dishonest with their promotions; they have been seduced by the potential of the coin and the promises of its creators. But it’s not only investors spreading the FOMO. Crypto bloggers, YouTubers, and financial advisors who want to take credit for predicting the next hit coin also end up inadvertently contributing to the hysteria. As a result, prices quickly go through the roof, whether or not the coin has the fundamentals or the real-world use cases to live up to the hype.

But when this sort of thing happens in the crypto world, don’t expect it to last long. No matter how sound the coin or the company or the news about it, after a FOMO-driven surge the price will always come down. It’s become a predictable cycle to crypto traders and enthusiasts. As hype grows, and FOMO rapidly spreads, it is eventually met by a wave of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or ‘FUD’ in crypto-speak. Buzz will inevitably fizzle out due to an advisory campaign that starts out as skepticism, evolves into criticism, and if that doesn’t serve to calm the price down, misinformation and personal attacks that defame the character of a coin or company often enter the game. Let us call this fear-fueled pattern the “FOMO-FUD cycle.” Fear drives the price up in one form and down in another.

It’s collective psychology in action, and the rise and fall of a given coin-hysteria can be traced visually in the charts displayed on market analysis websites and exchanges that plot crypto prices against time.

The FOMO-FUD cycle isn’t just something that happens entirely on its own. While part of it is organic, there’s no denying that some cryptocurrency influencers and investors orchestrate or at least fan the flames of strategic FOMO and FUD initiatives that have been intentionally designed to manipulate cryptocurrency prices. It’s pretty simple to understand why this happens. The FOMO-spreading crowd wants to make more money and the FUD-spreaders are generally those who missed the boat and are hoping their social engineering cyber-tactics can temporarily bring the coin’s price down enough to allow them to buy in at a discount. Of course, not every FUDster is trying to make a quick buck at the expense of other investors—some are voices of reason genuinely trying to advise caution to naïve investors. And some are simply trolls indulging in schadenfreude, who derive pleasure from contributing to the financial misfortune of others.

During this cycle, spreaders of FOMO and FUD are engaged in psychological and information warfare as they compete for the attention of the curious investor, who is intrinsically vulnerable owing to being always on the lookout for insightful opinions that could inform better investment decisions. It’s a bit ironic that in the crypto-world, taking the time to hear the opinions of others can actually hurt more than it helps.

The crypto-flavor of the week starting off the month of December was a currency called IOTA, which, despite all it has going for it, still fell victim to the FOMO-FUD cycle. IOTA’s price climbed from just over a dollar to well over five in less than a week’s time. This surge was attributed to newly published articles from major news outlets like Forbes, Reuters, and CNBC, which announced that the IOTA Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Berlin, had teamed up with corporate giants like Microsoft, Fujitsu, Bosch, and Samsung.

IOTA stands out in a sea of cryptocurrencies because it uses a distributed ledger technology that is a variant of the blockchain, known as Tangle, which supposedly solves the scaling issues associated with Bitcoin and allows transactions to be made for free. IOTA wants to use the Tangle network not only to exchange money back and forth like Bitcoin but also as a way for data to be shared and sold instantly and securely across the globe. To jump-start this effort, IOTA started the data marketplace project in 2015, but it wasn’t until recently that this initiative became newsworthy, thanks to bigger collaborators.

When the CNBC article hit the web last Monday morning with the headline “Little-known digital currency surges 90% after teaming up with firms like Microsoft,” the FOMO cycle took off like a spaceship. The FOMO spreaders didn’t have to work hard this time. No need to engineer dank memes when you can simply post quotes from mainstream news stories that cited a slew of new partnerships with corporations that are household names. Since the word “partnership” can apparently mean very different things to different people in the context of business, it became easy to portray the relationship between IOTA and its data marketplace participants—both current and tentative—as something much bigger than a collaboration as part of a “comprehensive pilot study,” as it is unambiguously described on the IOTA blog.

But those who worried that provocative headlines and sensational wording might have exaggerated the scope of these collaborations didn’t have to wait long for the FUD to kick in—and man, did it kick in hard. If FOMO made it rain for investors, FUD caused a drought.

In 24 hours, the price of IOTA tanked from a high of $5.50 to a low of around $3, beginning just after a vitriolic tweet brought up an old security vulnerability in the Tangle network that was discovered by an MIT lab. Of course, the tweet conveniently failed to mention that the vulnerability had since been removed and confirmed as such by the same lab. This may have started the descent, but the price really crashed after the publication of an article on a little-known website called Squawker, titled “PROOF: IOTA Is Falsifying Partnerships With Big Tech.”

As its title suggests, the report casts serious doubt on the legitimacy of the news reported by Reuters and CNBC:

“Everyone is excited over the promise of what these partnerships may bring to IOTA and data decentralization overall. The only problem is, several of these partnerships are not real.”

While the original version of the article directly blamed IOTA for the partnership announcements that Squawker was claiming was “fake news,” they later changed the title to “Proof: IOTA’s Partnerships With Big Tech Not Real,” and added a disclaimer that stated that the author now believes the ‘fake news’ should be attributed to misreporting by the media and not IOTA itself.

The only problem with this revision—which likely made the Squawker article’s fake news claim appear more legitimate in the eyes of readers—is that the collaborations between IOTA and these companies are, in fact, entirely real.

With some investigation, one can easily find clear evidence that Microsoft and IOTA had begun discussing how they could establish a working relationship. In the IOTA blog post that introduced the data marketplace project, there is a direct quote from Microsoft’s blockchain specialist Omkar Naik:

“We (Microsoft) are excited to partner with IOTA foundation and proud to be associated with its new data marketplace initiative.

It seems that the word partnership was being used casually here, and was not intended to imply a strategic partnership involving contracts and joint business ventures. While it may not have been the most suitable word to describe the relationship between Naik and IOTA, fault can hardly be attributed to the members of the IOTA foundation. In Squawker’s defense, it was noble of them to state that fact unequivocally in the revised version.

In fact, the final revision of the Squawker article actually displays tangible evidence for relationships between IOTA and all the aforementioned companies. It seems that the reporter simply chose to focus on a semantic issue rather than trying to clarify the nature of the relationship between IOTA and its data marketplace participants.

Reuters did in fact incorrectly report that Cisco was an active participant in the data marketplace project, but the mix-up was an honest and easy one to make. The founder of IOTA, David Sønstebø, clarified on Reddit that IOTA cofounded the Trusted IoT Alliance along with Cisco, but that they are not data marketplace participants at present. Reuters swiftly updated their article to reflect this inaccuracy.

I will go ahead and assume the best intentions when I say the Squawker article was a public service announcement and a cautionary word to investors, not an intentional smear campaign. Nonetheless, it was unabashed, grade-A, FUD fodder. The fact that the article appears to be well-investigated on the surface gave FUD spreaders the ultimate weapon to add to their arsenal. In no time, hundreds and maybe even thousands of tweets, posts, and comments spread across the web that expressed sentiments like, “IOTA lied about partnerships,” “Scam,” “Fake news,” and with a daring confidence, statements like, “I knew it” and “Told ya so.”

But the FUD cycle didn’t stop there. The Squawker article had spawned numerous newsletters and blogs summarizing it, warning investors to be wary of IOTA, creating a psychological atmosphere of doubt and causing further dumping of IOTA coins due solely to miscommunications and misinformation.

Even crypto-celeb Charlie Lee, the high-profile founder of Litecoin—the fifth biggest cryptocurrency by market cap (it was temporarily supplanted by IOTA before the FUD)—even joined in on the fun by tweeting, “The Microsoft partnership is fake?” It doesn't seem quite fair to label something "fake," since it implies deception and not miscommunication. If anything is to blame for the terminology mix-up, it is the fact that sometimes information gets distorted when it’s turned into headlines.

Charlie's tweet received a reply that went as far as to imply that IOTA actually paid Microsoft for the partnership. The FUD avalanche was striking to watch in real time, but also baffling, as it was hard to fathom how anyone could actually believe a company of the size and stature of Microsoft would engage in such an agreement.

And with that climax, the FOMO-FUD cycle had run most of its course. Of course, it never truly stops for any coin that has a lot going for it; the FOMO-FUD war wages on closer to equilibrium until new rumors or news surface and the cycle starts again.

While the FOMO-FUD cycle might be entertaining to watch, it is important to remember that this isn’t a game, even though it’s being played like one. These fear campaigns have real financial consequences for investors. Those who bought in at IOTA’s peak price and sold when the FUD hit hardest lost almost half their investment. For some crypto ‘whales,’ this would have been hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of dollars; for average Joes, only thousands or hundreds. But for all, it was almost half—and almost half is a lot.

What might be most troubling about the FOMO-FUD cycle is that when it has subsided, what remains is an ocean of conflicting information and exaggerations on both ends of the spectrum, making it almost impossible to distinguish fact from fiction. For example, IOTA founders Dominik Schiener and David Sønstebø tried to set the record straight numerous times in places like the comments section of the Squawker article and on Reddit, but almost no one saw these explanations, as it had become virtually impossible to find the signal amid the noise:

“Many of the companies that we on-boarded to the data marketplace usually require 2 - 4 weeks to approve official press releases internally. Exactly due this reason we on-boarded these companies first, and they are now starting to work on official press releases on their end (in fact, several are going to be announced before the end of the year, where we will showcase how the data marketplace can be applied to their respective industries).”

It seems that we are entering into a “post-truth” world with cryptocurrencies like we’ve recently seen in the world of politics. First, fake news became a problem when then-presidential candidate Donald Trumpreferenced bogus articles from right-wing extremist sites that were literally complete fabrications. Then, when reputable media outlets like the New York Times and CNN put a spotlight on the fake news problem, Trump chose to flip the script on them and label all their stories as “fake news”. As ridiculous as the strategy sounds, it worked, and the fear, uncertainty, and doubt Trump instilled in his supporters has them confused about the facts to this day.

The crypto world has seen a similar trajectory. In November, the crypto community at large became aware of a fake news problem when a strategically engineered FOMO campaign spread false rumors that the Chinese blockchain company and cryptocurrency NEO had partnered with the Chinese government, causing a sharp price surge before a crash when the truth came out. Now, with the case of IOTA, we have seen FUDsters use Trumpian tactics whereby legitimate news is called fake or a legitimate company called a scam. It makes me strongly suspect that we are seeing such dishonest FOMO and FUD, at least partially, because Trump has legitimized truth denial and baseless accusations, empowering swindlers and gaslighters who have found their way into the world of crypto.

A post-truth state of affairs has been damaging to politics and society, and it will also damage the crypto-economy if it is allowed to persist. Similarly, the widespread psychological manipulation of investors through fear campaigns does not help the community grow.

Cryptocurrencies aren’t just a vehicle for increasing one's wealth. They fund blockchain companies that are creating a technological revolution, which will transform the economy and benefit humanity as a whole. They also educate the public by forcing investors to read technical papers and watch interviews that describe how these innovations will impact the world potentially as much as the Internet and artificial intelligence—possibly more.

If we want to see a transformative technology take off and a crypto-economy flourish, those who participate must resist the urge to join in exclusively on one side of the FOMO-FUD cycle. It is fine for someone to be enthusiastic about their investments and the companies they support—it should even be encouraged—but that can be done while remaining realistic about the serious challenges and uncertainties that any new start-up in a nascent industry will inevitably face. IOTA is no exception.

The same goes for journalists, who should disclose if they’ve invested significantly in crypto or have any other conflicts of interest that would reasonably be expected to be divulged. This is certainly not to say that journalists who want to cover crypto should not invest in it—quite the contrary, as I firmly believe that many journalists beginning to cover Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies today have a superficial understanding of the space precisely because they haven’t invested. An investment, even a tiny one, forces one to delve deeper into the weeds of the tech and its practical applications. Being part of the community naturally exposes one to so many discussions and differing points of view that it creates a context around cryptocurrencies that could not come from casual observation alone. Personally, making a small investment in cryptocurrency set me on a journey into a technological realm I didn’t even know existed and opened my mind to new ideas and possibilities that I would not have imagined otherwise.

To ensure the cryptocurrency movement moves along the right path, we who participate in it must teach ourselves to be skeptical not only of sensationalized statements, but also of skeptical statements themselves. We must be aware of how easily we are manipulated when our fear systems are triggered, and adjust our investing behavior accordingly. Those who have the time should actively try to bring clarity to the discussion when they have reliable information or insight.

If the crypto-community can make these efforts collectively, order will emerge from all the chaos, and a body of more reliable and consistent information regarding distributed digital currencies will attract new investors and enthusiasts who are eager to help bring about the impending global blockchain revolution.

I think the situation is exasperated by some very poor journalism in the crypto industry. Many dont understand it, or have their own agendas, or try to twist the story into something that will get the users attention

Its hard to make money as a publisher. To make money you need to write controversial and sensational articles (and headlines). Just reporting the facts and truth is not a good business model in these times of free and ad-free content and low attention spans

I have invested a portion of money into IOTA, after I have spent weeks of studying the whole concept and I realized the big potential of IOTA. Important to say, the portion I have spent is an equivalent of mine month sallary, a portion of money I can afford to loose with no problem. Believe it or not i did not care much about the price, just the feeling of being part of something great was the main reward for me. Now I am sad. The FUD and FOMO is nothing new in the cryptoworld so I have expected it to come sooner or later.I have also expected the pump and dump strategy played often by the big whales. What I have not expected, that this time the FUD campaign will be so brutal. I wish lot of patience to the investors and lot of strenght to the IOTA team to stay focused, because as mentioned in this article, IOTA is trully something which could not only bring the crypto-eco system on another lvl, but I dare to say, the whole mankind too.

Too bad you had to choose the example of 'reputable media outlets like the New York Times and CNN put a spotlight on the fake news problem'... This is a perfect example of media misinformation. How could you be so right about one thing and so wrong about another? Sure, Trump is an idiot and a liar, and cited fake news, but CNN and NYT are the epitome of fake news. Too bad you had to piggy back your political views on a piece of truth, which now makes it very difficult to be seen as such.

NY Times and CNN certainly get it wrong from time to time. CNN routinely frustrates me, to be honest. But they still have high standards when it comes to vetting stories relative to most publications out there. If they blatantly lie they'll quickly get hit with a lawsuit, where smaller sites can get away with completely fabricated stories. We should always read any story with a skeptical eye, but there's healthy skepticism and illogical skepticism. Unfortunately, we are seeing too much of the latter.

YesButNo: exactly what I thought too. Great article except the last part made my eyebrows frown; how can this guy not see the propaganda of mainstream media. Better not express your political opinion in this article indeed. But other than that, great article!

Because I've seen enough of stories on BOTH sides of political spectrum to be proven completely fake, so taking sides here and calling NYT for example, a reliable news source - is a bit overstretched. Both sides have their agenda and both sides lie on one thing or other, nowdays any mainstream media information should be taken with caution and scepticism, whether it's fox news or NYT, cnn, breitbart, buzzfeed. They all lie for their own gains (and people associated with them or their ideological and political views).

Fox News and NY Times are not polar opposites. If you have a line with truth in the middle, NY Times will be a little to the side. Fox and Brietbart would be so far to the side you'd have to turn your head to see them.

IOTA value is way below five dollars. In fact from all top crypto coins IOTA is the last useful today. It simply does not yet work. The price was speculatively pumped following the recent announcements . The IOTA team should have corrected the misinformation about the partnership with Microsoft, but the team simply chose to ride the pump and benefit from it, which is very unprofessionally. It will take a long time for the regain the faith in the team and IOTA.

When I was reading the article I was wondering if the shitstorm in the comments below me was already taking place. So far I would have expected worth but then your comment showed up with a statement like

Anonymous wrote:

[...]The IOTA team should have corrected the misinformation about the partnership with Microsoft[...]

...where in so few words one just needs to ask himself frequently, have you even read the article? Probably it doesn't matter as you just found another platform for your comment which is everything the article is about.

However, in general we really see the same problems in cryptoland now than we saw in the political life. Unfortunately there is no good solution. If a lot of people act in way that supports this "news"/"information" culture it's really hard. We would need to implement more responsibility into people again, but how? And it also looks like every project will need tremendous resources to counter such misinformation avalanches in future. Especially the smaller ones suffer from this which is sad.

How useful is the vast majority of copychain coins?
Yeah, they do nothing. Nothing at all. Especially BTC with huge fees and clogged network, yet the price goes up.
The article is describing exactly the people like you.
How can you tell IOTA is not working, when entire Data Marketplace is running on it? Hell, I have sent few tx in the past few days, and it's working fine. And waaaay quicker than ETH or BTC.
When ETH came into being I was all like "this shit is the future" and jumped on it like squirrel on nuts, but then IOTA came out and. It solves most of the blockchain flaws, it's just better. If something better comes out, I will not look back, just switch to new, better technology. Just like I switch my smartphone. Every year you get something better. I don't see the reason to stick with old things when there are new and better things around.

I actually support IOTA, the team and the technology, and I run the full node. I confirm IOTA transactions, may be even confirmed yours. When I saw the IOTA price skyrocketed I knew that it would hurt IOTA, and it did. I am aware of all problems with different coins. That price jump hurt many people who bought for the price IOTA was not ready yet. Had the team timely corrected the bad journalism and the mis information the price would have likely increased more gradually. Again, I support the technology, but I find the attitude of the team somewhat unprofessional.

The article easily gives the impression that IOTA was high jacked by a few whales that manipulate the market with unfounded FUD and FOMO while the truth couldnt be further away.

The IOTA foundation is known to ban people from their slack asking too many questions while giving out questionable information at selected timepoints to push the price as much as possible. One could call that direct price manipulation while misleading their userbase of potential investment opportunities.

Believe it or not, there are people reading articles online who are capable of reading so many words without them being chopped into little easy-to-digest chunks.
Summary of this comment: No, it’s just okay the way it is.

1. The general premise of your opinion piece is factually absurd. From drug wars to illegal wars to torture to bank bail-outs to whistle-blower witch-hunts, it's because of great reporters that the public has become more aware that modern governments are in a state of perpetual post-truth.

2. Trump isn't a cause of "post-truth" revolt, he's the symptom. Should you be reminded that Hillary Clinton rigged the DNC? Should you be reminded about where the Clinton foundation gets funds? Should you be reminded that Obama prosecuted more whistle-blowers than every other president combined? Voters have been fed a hefty diet with the argument from authority.

3. Cryptocurrency is chalk full of all-sorts of nastiness. It's unregulated and it's full of money, and it's the wild west. Did behaviors such as selfishness, survival, and status suddenly appear with blockchain. No. It was always there, inside of us. Right there with it, was our post-truth governments, feeding us lies.

People are crappy when these behaviors collide with money. It's astronomically naive to think they suddenly showed up with the recent president, or a piece of computer software.

This has almost nothing to do with my article. I was very critical of Clinton and the DNC's bias which surely was the only reason Bernie Sanders isn't our president right now.

There's a lot of dishonesty in politics and there always has been, on both sides—no arguing that.

Trump is the most dishonest person modern politics has ever seen. Literally everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie so absurd it's hard to imagine how anyone believes it.

I notice that most people who comment just want to get their points across. You should write an article yourself. Some of your points are valid, but they are irrelevant to my article. And there's not the conflict between what I said and what you are saying that you apparently want people to believe.

Thanks for writing this. Dont' agree with everything - but the gist of it is true - watch out for smear campaigns with any crypto. And ALWAYS fact check (this is something that is supposed to be journalistic responsibility, but doesn't seem to happen much in america these days.

It's clear you understand what is going on and I loved the idea you proposed about the importance of not pumping a cryptocurrency up, or down talking it, as transparency will bring in new investment in the field. Well said.

Fear is one of the things that kept humanity alive.Not ptogressing but ALIVE and safe.

For example most of the times if you see smoke and people runing out of a building you should run. Of course there might be a good time to go into the building and grab some wallets but most of the people run.

Some people chose to ignore the signs while others act on it.

I have a friend who was impressing girls calling them : "hey, i'm at the mayor's office downtown, can i pick you up in 10 mins?". He was at the mcdonalds near mayors office. This is how i see the whole microsoft "partenership".

Microsoft "partenered" with GreenPeace meaning they donated 1milion euros to plant some trees not that will do any work to save the fcking whales.

The deeper underlying reason for the FUD against IOTA is because it will disrupt all blockchain based cryptos and miners. You have to know the Tangle technology why this is so.

So all those blockchain interest groups - with market cap say 80% to 90% (say $350 billion) plus the miners with billion $ investments on their mining rigs and all their retail and institutional investors - are the forces of potential FUD to protect their investment. Case in point, the DCI-MIT FUD were perpetrated by people with conflicts of interest & directly involved with Zcash, Lighning Network, BTC etc.

With all these miners that are like into a frenzy state of mind, the 21M bitcoins are almost all mined. And thus, the price of the bitcoin is slowly dropping. Remember when it was up to 14K? Not even a year has passed and it already dropped 50%. Not to mention all the people who spent fortunes into building farms. Such a waste of money for me. It also hurts the enviroment as the waste produced by them is ureal for the proportions of the mining rigs. Graphic cards are overpriced, everything is getting more and more expensive. I am just waiting the moment when all the transactions will be monitored. Only then people will start to realise that it was almost a scam. Only who had ALREADY thousands of dollars could afford a mining rig back then. Same principle applies now. According to getcrypt, bitcoin is going to drop a lot more. Let me know what you think about that.

I understand the Winklevoss twins, all major banks that were ramping up their investments in BTC, any ETF's that were preparing to present their case to the SEC and all whales have dumped their BTC from their portfolios today. This is as a result of one man saying it will go to zero at Davos. It's worse than pond scum and could never compete with the USD because it can't be infinitely printed and manipulated. And all hail blockchain technology - a great tagline many use but don't understand. Oh, and don't forget with the demise of BTC mining comes the reversal of climate change - thank God. Mankind will be so blessed when this scourge of digital fake store of value and currency dies and fiat will be printed forever!

Technocracy is inherently slavery and no matter how good the initial intentions, it will always concentrate wealth of power into the hands of a few. What is ostensibly decentralized control of power inevitably becomes centralized control of power.

Artificial complexity and artificial scarcity never equals true freedom and is the hallmark and peak of every civilization just before societal collapse.

Throughout history over roughly the past 10,000 years (only 1% of human evolution), every single civilization has collapsed and factually there is a direct correlation between societal collapse and the erosion of soil.

Self proclaimed "AnarchoCapitalists" are leading a revolution driven by collective insanity and mass extinction fueled by the industrial economy and institutionalized slavery. What's ironic is that an intuitive study on the etymology of the root words anarchy & capitalism reveals that AnarchoCapitalism is both contradictory and hypocritical.

The mantra of industrial civilization is ecocide and genocide. God is the money-machine of the Global Economy - in digital fascism we trust...

Consider cryptoeconomics compared to living systems ecology (a local living economy IS ecology) whereby nature is based on autopoiesis (local self autonomy) and gift / abundance (ecological mutualism and biotic communities for example).

Ontogenetic crippling and cultural schizophrenia has bred such delusion and greed that we give our power to these technocrats / benevolent dictators who are ultimately in control of the research, engineering, manufacturing, development and programming of this "revolutionary" technology powering the cryptoeconomy as the new backbone of Web 3.0 (or should we say Apple 2.0, jail made cool)?

Remember, it's the technocrats that manufacture, engineer and program the cryptofarms and blockchain technology that runs this "decentralized economy".

How is this appropriate technology???

Just because thee software is open source? Ha! Let's see, how can we fabricate the hardware in our local community and lay the fiber that connects us all to the Internet of things? I hope your neighbors jack and kill have been formally indoctrinated with their ivy league priesthood degrees (PhDs) in STEM (Science Technology Education Mathematics).

STEM divorced from the perennial wisdom traditions and local self autonomy of our indigineous ancestors has brought upon us an apocalypse veiled by a society of spectacle.

Consider the passive consumer lifestyle where "the vast majority of us don't know where our stuff is coming from or where our shit is going". And cryptoeconomics promises to make this shift from Empire to Earth Community through technocracy!? It looks like I need to drink some more of that technocratic Kool-aide first...

Cryptoeconomics and related technologies including bitcoin and ethereum are autocratic-mechanistic rather than democratic-organic.

Overspecialization and division of labor increasingly leads to domination by the technocratic elite (mostly sociopaths suffering from nature deficiency disorder and nature-culture divide). Most of these technocrats have been raised in cities are inherently driven by delusion, greed and even self hatred / mistrust.

It's these same technocrats that have an extreme aversion to true freedom, biophilia and biognosis that comes through simple living and spiritual empathy which connect us all through an interdependent and liberating way of life built upon trust, joy and abundance through artful living and the actualization of our ecological role as a species in the web of life (the eternal living web of consciousness and nature, not "web 3.0" for all planetary robots and zombies dreaming of singularity)...

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